ISPs are a nightmare. I dread calling Comcast for any reason
Bad automated system and often less than helpful employees, all while I’m already frustrated over my internet.
Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
331–340 of 348 posts
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get rid of the monopoly. The reason they can have such bad CR is because their marketshare is leaps and bounds beyond the competition so they CAN. They provided an amazing product until they hit monopoly status then started cutting quality.. Oldest trick in the book. Some solutions are to remove whatever government policies are giving them an advantage, or break up the monopoly via government, or provide government h…
>Get rid of the monopoly. Which monopoly? >The reason they can have such bad CR is because their marketshare is leaps and bounds beyond the competition so they CAN. Defining monopolies by "has bad customer service" is certainly a unique and interesting take. Almost borders on the "no true scotsman" fallacy. Of course, the real irony that you don't understand is that this would entrench monopolies: they're the ones wi…
> Defining monopolies by "has bad customer service" is certainly a unique and interesting take.
That's the dumbest possible interpretation of what I said.
Not all monopolies have bad CR: see Amazon.
But every single company I've had bad CR experiences with with, I would venture many people would agree, is a monopoly. Google, Utilities, Cell phones, Internet, etc.
Any upstart company typically HAS to have good CR because keeping customers is valuable to them.
Now this is anecdotal, and I'm not going to provide papers or scientific studies because I don't care enough about this conversation to do that, but where there's smoke there's fire, and I've seen this pattern repeated over and over in the past decade or so, and some one who cares more than me should look further into this.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Get rid of the monopoly. Which monopoly? >The reason they can have such bad CR is because their marketshare is leaps and bounds beyond the competition so they CAN. Defining monopolies by "has bad customer service" is certainly a unique and interesting take. Almost borders on the "no true scotsman" fallacy. Of course, the real irony that you don't understand is that this would entrench monopolies: they're the ones wi…
Agree, and to add to that: > provide government help to the competition This is just paying for CR with extra steps. > remove whatever government policies are giving them an advantage At least we can agree on something :)
> At least we can agree on something :)
Woo hoo! So happy!
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think its important to recognise that quite a lot of modern web based companies are running their business on the 0 cents model. That is they take the marginal cost of a customer and push it down to zero and rely on scale to make a profit from it. Well, that's their problem. There should absolutely be a "right to speak with a human", like a restaurant must pass health inspections, and other such things. If they c…
> There should absolutely be a "right to speak with a human", like a restaurant must pass health inspections, and other such things. > If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close. If you're not paying for a service, are you even really a customer? Hacker News is free. Do you really expect to be able to pick up the phone and call someone at Y Combinator to discuss your Hacker News…
>If you're not paying for a service, are you even really a customer?
Places where you "don't pay" still have certain regulations they need to pass.
If you give free food to people on the street (for some marketing event or charity or whatever) you still need to pass the cost of sanitary inspections and such.
>Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts. If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account. The whole idea is ridiculous
They way you've framed it, perhaps. Or maybe not.
For one "If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account" is not that ridiculous. It's how businesses worked since the dawn of time: people paid to get their services. If GitHub and every other "selling eyeballs" business is forced to come back to that, that's a win in my book.
Second, notice the strawman phrasing: "If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account". How about them being forced to giving it to anyone with a PAID account?
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
A heuristic such as, right to speak with a human, if a) Customer pays for the service b) Service stores any data of the customer's (e.g., email provider, cloud storage provider, facebook, youtube, instagram, etc., but would need a threshold i.e., a simple throwaway comment would not have enough value to trigger, but an article, photo, or document would). c) Service acts as IdP where being locked out might result in b…
What does speaking to a human accomplish? Your ticket was probably reviewed by a real person. If you called instead of ticketing, you'd talk to the same person, which now means responses would be slower because phone calls take more time than ticket handling. The phone person won't be any more empowered than the ticket person, so you'll still not have the issue resolved. The only difference is that there's a human to…
>What does speaking to a human accomplish? Your ticket was probably reviewed by a real person.
It's hard for my not to wish you to have the kind of horrible automated ticket/service experience that makes everybody who had gone through it immediately understand the value of speaking to a human.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you can comply with ethical business practices without hiring employees to deal with hundreds of thousands of callers. Automated moderation is a thing, and actually responding to support tickets instead of ignoring them is also a thing. I think you underestimate how many services you rely on that wouldn't be able to survive with a legal requirement that they were required to take calls from any human that wanted…
>the $50-100/month for each service that would likely be required if every single one had to support a fully-staffed call center You're estimating what, that every customer would on average spend at at least an hour a month on the phone with each and every service they do business with?
>potentially affected non-customers
There is a reason that most companies make it hard to talk to a human before you've already exhausted all other support channels.
Make something like that a right and people will use it. Maybe 99% of the time you won't need a human for a particular service in a month, but there will be users who are on the phone every day, maybe multiple times per day.
And your monthly fee would need to exist to pay for the users who abuse the right.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#337I had to call the Washington State Department of Revenue (government office) yesterday. I DID speak to a human, but the human had no power to actually help. In my opinion, it is far worse when government has bad service than when a private business has bad service because I have no choice to switch. If I don't pay the Department of Revenue, they have the power to imprison me and steal my belongings. If I don't pay Google, then I just have my service cancelled.
Tldr; we need to solve the problem of bad service in government more urgently than bad service in big tech.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#338There is one advantage of no customer support for you as a customer that I haven't seen mentioned. If there is no customer support, there is no one for a fraudster to call and socially engineer, and less people with access to the databases who can easily be bribed. I've seen people cite this as an advantage of using Gmail, for example.
I don't think this outweighs the fact that you can't contact anyone in most cases, though.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#339Reminds me of one of the Oscar nominated live action short films this year, "Please Hold". It takes this dystopian concept to the extreme, where a man is subjected to an automated justice system and has very little rights to speak with humans in the process. Not my favorite of the nominations, but an interesting watch: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11383280/
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does speaking to a human accomplish? Your ticket was probably reviewed by a real person. If you called instead of ticketing, you'd talk to the same person, which now means responses would be slower because phone calls take more time than ticket handling. The phone person won't be any more empowered than the ticket person, so you'll still not have the issue resolved. The only difference is that there's a human to…
> What does speaking to a human accomplish? Your ticket was probably reviewed by a real person. It's hard for my not to wish you to have the kind of horrible automated ticket/service experience that makes everybody who had gone through it immediately understand the value of speaking to a human.
What happens then when companies decide to outsource speaking to a human. Each human agent only handles very specific set of things. When you call you are constantly redirected and on hold. Nobody is willing to help you because your specific problem is outside of what they are comfortable with. Nobody cares about customer service because they are just outsourced. People who are working at outsourcing company's are underpaid and don't care much about any individual customer. In order to keep you from giving them a bad review/comment they just transfer you.
For instance I had an issue with my phone, I had to call support. I got redirected to 5 agents at 3 different companies before I finally started getting anywhere. Note some of those agents even gave me the wrong phone number and basically ended up taking me to some random unrelated companies. The end result was to start doing things over email (basically same as ticketing). After hours of phone calls and even longer on hold I'm finally (maybe) getting somewhere using emails. Still haven't gotten to the destination but maybe I will soon